Frequently during the game, you’ll want your character to accomplish something where there’s a risk of failure. When this happens, you roll dice, to decide the outcome of the challenge.

How Challenges Work

Every challenge is between your character and another character, or between your character and circumstances. You roll one ten-sided die to see how well your character rises to the challenge. Someone else rolls for the opposition. If you are testing yourself against one of the other players in the group, they roll against you. If you are testing yourself against an NPC or something in the environment, the GM rolls against you.

Scores

Each side gets to add one of their abilities or skills to their die roll. Static obstacles, like a wall you’re attempting to climb, will have a fixed difficulty number in place of an ability score.

After rolling, add the skill or ability you’re using to the die roll, and announce your total. Whoever has the higher total is currently winning the challenge. If there’s a tie, the side that initiated the challenge wins.

Substitutions – Taking A Different Tack

The GM names the skills or abilities each side could add to their roll. Each side picks one of these to use, and announces it.

If you think another of your skills or abilities is applicable, you can ask to use it instead. The GM will agree or disagree with your substitution.

Example: Adam wants a shopkeeper to lower their price. The GM tells him this will be a challenge, with both sides adding their Charm or Negotiation to the roll. Adam’s character is a bit of a brute, and he’s not feeling very good about rolling with Charm or Negotiation, either. But he did recently save the city, and everyone knows it. Adam asks if he can roll with his Reputation score, instead of Charm or Negotiation, and the GM agrees.

Often you’ll take a penalty to your total for making a substitution. How big the penalty is depends on how far-fetched the substitution is. The GM can apply any penalty they decide. Standard penalties are -3 for a substitution that mostly makes sense, -5 for a dubious substitution, and -8 for a substitution that’s only borderline believable. Implausible substitutions will be vetoed outright.

The GM should err on the side of penalizing substitutions. To do otherwise is to reward boring, one-note characters. You, in turn, don’t have to stick with a substitution, once you hear the penalty. You can go back to using one of the originally offered skills.

Rarely, the GM might award you with a bonus, usually +3 at most, if you come up with an especially clever substitution. If your substitution is so clever it redefines how the challenge works, the GM should reconsider the challenge from the start, giving your opponent a chance to pick an ability more suited to the new challenge.

Both sides should hold off on rolling until both sides have decided what skill or ability they’re rolling with.

Bidding

Once the dice have hit the table, and the contestants have announced their totals, then a winner is apparent. But the loser can strive to change the outcome. The two sides go back and forth, pointing out advantages they have, or disadvantages the opponent has. The player who’s set to lose the challenge goes first.

Advantages and disadvantages can be environmental, “I have the high ground”, or inherent to the character, “I’m a better swordsman than my opponent”.

If your bid is successful, then your opponent gets a chance to counter it with a bid of their own. This goes back and forth until one of you fails to bid.

For a bid to be successful, it must be new, relevant, true and significant.

Each bid must be new. No repeating yourself.

You also can’t make a bid using the same score you rolled with. For example, Kim dueling an opponent, blade to blade. To see if she can land a blow on her opponent, she rolls a die and adds her Finesse score. In the bidding that ensues, she can’t bid using finesse, such as by claiming “I’m more nimble than my opponent.” She can bid using a different ability, like her melee skill.

No nonsensical bids. Your bid must be applicable to the challenge at hand.

Players often don’t know their opponent’s abilities, and may risk untrue bids. You can announce “I’m a better swordsman than my opponent” without having any idea if it’s true or not. When you announce it as your bid, the game master will ask your skill level at melee, compare it to the opponent’s skill level in melee, and announce if it was a successful bid.

A bid also must be significant. Every bid has a number score. If you’re claiming to be a better swordsman than your opponent, then you have a melee skill of 6, then your bid has strength 6. If you’re claiming an environmental advantage, the game master will decide what its score should be. For a bid to be significant, it can’t undershoot the opponent’s last bid by more than 3.

You can’t underbid your opponent twice in a row. If your last bid was lower than the opponent’s, your new bid has to at least equal their reply.

When starting bidding, the score the loser of the roll has to beat is the amount they lost by.

Bidding stops when one side fails a bid, or declines to bid further. The other side wins the challenge.

Consequences

The consequences of a challenge should be fairly clear from the outset. If they aren’t, the GM might take a moment to spell out the effects of winning or losing a challenge.

Consequences may change as the result of substitutions and bids. The GM might point out these changed consequences, or not. Usually if the GM declines to point out a changed consequence, it’s to avoid interrupting the game. GM’s won’t normally be silent about changed consequences just for the sake of surprise, unless the character would also be surprised by the changed outcome.

Complex Challenges

The GM decides which challenges to make simple and which to make complex. Simple challenges take a single die roll, and are for moments that the GM wants to resolve quickly. When the story would benefit from a longer look at a challenge, more rolls may be called for.

It’s common to break a challenge into two rolls. Most RPG players will be familiar with a two-roll combat system, with one roll to land a blow, and a second roll to see how powerful it is. We use this same system in Firelock, with a (Finesse or Melee) challenge to land or avoid a blow. If the attacker wins the first challenge, then there’s a second challenge (Body) to find out how severe the wound is.

A similar approach should be used for any high-drama challenge, that benefits from being explored in detail. To treat a mysterious affliction, the GM might call for one check for diagnosis, and another to choose the right cure. As their bonus to their first roll, the player could choose to apply Sense or Medicine. For the bonus to the second roll, the treatment, the player could use Mind or the Medicine skill. no more than once each. This creates a challenge where a player with a high skill (in Medicine) can overcome a weakness in one ability, Sense or Mind, but not both.

When there’s a complex challenge, the first roll

Group Challenges

For group challenges, only one pair of rolls is made at a time.

Sample Ability Challenges

Body

• Feats of strength.
• Resisting injuries and disease.
• Healing injuries.

Finesse

• Hitting a target
• Performing surgery
• Sneaking up on someone.

Mind

• Remembering a fact.
• Pouring over endless library tomes to find a clue.
• Outwitting a rival.

Sense

• Spotting a clue.
• Noticing that someone is sneaking up on you.
• Taking the measure of a challenge. (Forcing the GM to roll their dice in front of the screen.)

Social

• Recruiting followers.
• Persuading people.
• Detecting lies and understanding motivations.